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Mr Cameron pledged to “bring some common sense” to the laws surrounding compensation. He will warn that the high-profile activities of lawyers have led to “legal hypersensitivity to risk, accident and injury”.

The Conservatives are likely to stop lawyers advertising on television and from earning big success and referral fees when fighting personal injury claims which has “led to a growth in ‘ambulance chasing’.”

Mr Cameron will criticise high-profile legal cases such as when parents who put up a bouncy castle for a children’s party were sued when a boy was injured after colliding with another child.

He will say that although personal injury awards have not increased recently, high-profile cases have led to paranoia developing which has led to many health and safety rules being introduced.

Mr Cameron will say: “It is clear that what began as a noble intention to protect people from harm has mutated into a stultifying blanket of bureaucracy, suspicion and fear that has saturated our country.

“The biggest cause of this excessive health and safety culture is the way these rules have been interpreted and used. The term ‘compensation culture’ is a toxic one in our country.”

“Each prominent claim and pay-out feeds into the public perception that the threat of litigation is never far away. Businesses, organisations and individuals operate under the shadow of the worst case scenario.”

He will add: “The more vulnerable they feel, the more cautiously they act – and the more stringent their health and safety processes become. The thicker the handbooks, the longer and more tedious the training days, the sillier the rules.”

Mr Cameron’s attack on health and safety laws is part of a wider Conservative drive to reduce bureaucracy in Britain if the party is elected next year.

Last night, in another speech, Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary, said that courts will be able to ignore Europeanulings on human rights under Conservative plans to give power back to British judges.

Mr Grieve said the current Human Rights Act had been “interpreted as requiring a degree of deference to Strasbourg that I believe was and should be neither required nor intended”.

Instead, he said, a new Bill of Rights - which would replace the Human Rights Act - would make clear that British courts could allow for UK common law to take precedence over decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Mr Grieve said: “We would want to reword it to emphasise the leeway of our national courts to have regard to our own national jurisprudence and traditions and to other common law precedents while still acknowledging the relevance of Strasbourg Court decisions.”